ducted with scant deliberation, and it is
unclear why the Army did not investi-
gate it.
Assange had obtained internal Army
records of the operation, which stated
that everyone killed, except for the Reu-
ters journalists, was an insurgent. And the
day after the incident an Army spokes-
person said, 'There is no question that
Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in
combat operations against a hostile force."
Assange was hoping that Project B would
undermine the Army's official narrative.
"This video shows what modern warfare
has become, and, I think, after seeing it,
whenever people hear about a certain
number of casualties that resulted during
fighting with close air support, they will
understand what is going on," he said in
the Bunker. "The video also makes clear
that civilians are listed as insurgents auto-
matically, unless they are children, and
that bystanders who are killed are not
even mentioned."
W ikiLeaks receives about thirty
submissions a day, and typically
posts the ones it deems credible in their
raw, unedited state, with commentary
alongside. Assange told me, "I want to
set up a new standard: 'scientific journal-
ism.' If you publish a paper on DNA, you
are required, by all the good biological
journals, to submit the data that has in-
formed your research-the idea being
that people will replicate it, check it, ver-
ifY it. So this is something that needs to
be done for journalism as well. There is
an immediate power imbalance, in that
readers are unable to verifY what they are
being told, and that leads to abuse." Be-
cause Assange publishes his source ma-
terial, he believes that WikiLeaks is free
to offer its analysis, no matter how spec-
wative. In the case of Project B, Assange
wanted to edit the raw footage into a
short film as a vehicle for commentary.
For a while, he thought about calling the
film "Permission to Engage," but wti-
mately decided on something more
forceful: "Collateral Murder." He told
Gonggrijp, 'We want to knock out this
'collateral damage' euphemism, and so
when anyone uses it they will think 'col-
lateral murder.'"
The video, in its original form, was a
puzzle-a fragment of evidence divorced
from context. Assange and the others in
the Bunker spent much of their time try-
44 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 7, 2010
ing to piece together details: the units in-
volved, their command structure, the
rules of engagement, the jargon soldiers
used on the radio, and, most important,
whether and how the Iraqis on the
ground were armed.
"One of them has a weapon," Assange
said, peering at blurry footage of the men
walking down the street. "See all those
people standing out there."
"And there is a guy with an RPG over
his arm," Gonggrijp said.
, '1 ' " A . d " I d
m not sure. ssange sal. toes
look a little bit like an RPG." He played
the footage again. "I'll tell you what is
very strange," he said. "If it is an RPG,
then there is just one RPG. Where are all
the other weapons? All those guys. It is
pretty weird."
The forensic work was made more
difficult because Assange had declined to
discuss the matter with military officials.
"I thought it wowd be more harmful
than helpful," he told me. "I have ap-
proached them before, and, as soon as
they hear it is WikiLeaks, they are not
terribly coöperative." Assange was run-
ning Project B as a surprise attack. He
had encouraged a rumor that the video
was shot in Mghanistan in 2009, in the
hope that the Defense Department
wowd be caught unprepared. Assange
does not believe that the military acts
in good faith with the media. He said
to me, "What right does this institu-
tion have to know the story before the
bli
"
pu c.
This adversarial mind-set permeated
the Bunker. Late one night, an activist
asked if Assange might be detained upon
his arrival in the United States.
"If there is ever a time it was safe for
me to go, it is now," Assange assured
him.
"They say that Gitmo is nice this time
of year," Gonggrijp said.
Assange was the sole decision-maker,
and it was possible to leave the house at
night and come back after sunrise and see
him in the same place, working. ("I spent
two months in one room in Paris once
without leaving," he said. "People were
handing me food.") He spoke to the
team in shorthand-"I need the conver-
sion stu:fI;" or "Make sure that credit-card
donations are acceptable"-all the while
resolving flareups with the overworked
volunteers. To keep track of who was
doing what, Gonggrijp and another ac-
tivist maintained a workflow chart with
yellow Post-Its on the kitchen cabinets.
Elsewhere, people were translating the
video s subtides into various languages, or
making sure that servers wowdn't crash
from the traffic that was expected after
the video was posted. Assange wanted
the families of the Iraqis who had died in
the attack to be contacted, to prepare
them for the inevitable media attention,
and to gather additional information.
In conjunction with Iceland's national
broadcasting service, RUV, he sent two
Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find
them.
By the end of the week, a frame-by-
frame examination of the footage was
nearly complete, revealing minute de-
tails-evidence of a body on the ground,
for instance-that were not visible by ca-
sual viewing. (''1 am about twelve thou-
sand frames in," the activist who re-
viewed it told me. "It's been a morbid
day, going through these people's last
moments.") Assange had decided to ex-
clude the Hellfìre incident from the film;
the attack lacked the obvious human di-
mension of the others, and he thought
that viewers might be overloaded with
information.
The edited film, which was eighteen
minutes long, began with a quote from
George Orwell that Assange and M had
selected: "Political language is designed
to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give the appearance
of solidity to pure wind." It then pre-
sented information about the journalists
who had been killed, and about the
official response to the attack. For the
audio of this section, one of the film's
Icelandic editors had layered in frag-
ments of radio banter from the soldiers.
As Assange reviewed the cut, an activ-
ist named Gudmundur Gudmundsson
spoke up to say that the banter allowed
viewers to "make an emotional bond"
with the soldiers. Assange argued that it
was mosdy fragmentary and garbled, but
Gudmundsson insisted: "It is just used
all the time for triggering emotions."
"At the same time, we are displaying
them as monsters," the editor said.
"But emotions always rule," Gud-
mundsson said. "By the way, I worked
on the sound recording for a film, 'Chil-
dren of Nature,' that was nominated
for an Oscar, so I am speaking from
. "
experIence.